Mastering Material Fitting with the Tick Stick

In this video, Scott Wadsworth shares insights on using a tick stick for precise material fitting in construction, cabinetry, or boat building. With a focus on overcoming challenges in creating custom shapes, he demonstrates the effectiveness of this tool and offers practical tips from his extensive experience. For more information, explore the Essential Craftsman YouTube channel.

TRANSCRIPT:

This collection of parts and pieces represents an imaginary situation in construction, cabinetry, or boat building. You've got to create one piece of material that fits any kind of bizarre shape, and you have one shot to do it. None of these conventional carpentry tools are that much help.

But a spiral stick, a tick stick, or a wiggle stick is the tool you can use to make a piece of material fit—whether it's steel, plywood, or glass. We’re going to walk into the wood shop, and I'm going to make a piece of material fit in there, probably the first time.

Before I do that, I learned about tick sticks from a man named Dean Muk at the Northwest Blacksmith Association Spring Conference, probably in 2008. Dean is an exceptional blacksmith who has worked in the boat-building industry in Seattle. He encountered this technique because it has been used in boat building since we started building boats.

I came home, had to try it, and it worked out well because two years later, Sai Swan and I got a commission to put fireplace doors in a stone fireplace. I had to make a piece of steel conform around the opening, leaving a rectangular space in the middle for the doors. I thought, "Wait a minute. Dean taught me how to use a tick stick." It worked perfectly.

The only other time I've used it was on the speck house. We had a tricky juncture between the garage, the main house, and the breezeway. There was one piece of roof sheeting that I could only access from the bottom, which meant I couldn't scribe anything, so I had to make a tick stick. And it worked.

Now, the beauty of a tick stick is that you can make something fit that is the size of a lunchbox or something the size of a garage door. You have to be able to adjust the size of your tick stick and create a big enough storyboard that serves as the substrate you’ll mark on, which becomes the template for projecting the shape onto the piece you’re going to cut.

As you begin to think about your storyboard and your tick stick, let me drop this in here. This is big enough; it covers about 90% of the space. Let’s just imagine that’s going to work. You need to fasten it down so it doesn’t move at all. I'm going to do that with a wood screw on each end. Placement is not critical at this point.

Now, this is just cardboard. It has to be a little durable so you can pick it up and move it around when you're ready to start transferring the marks. It needs to be thin; you don’t want to put plywood in there because that will raise you off your point of contact and introduce variability. A piece of white cardboard works well. Fasten it firmly in place—use tape if you must.

The spiral stick needs to have crisp edges and a funky shape. The funky shape becomes important because the marks will overlap each other, which can get confusing. You need to identify exactly where that thing goes. I’ve made the mistake before of just having a 45-degree angle. Sometimes, you need a long, drawn-out point to get way back in some place and achieve an accurate location.

All right, that's in place. We're fastened down, and none of these are going to move. Let's start with the spiral stick at the first point. I'm going to go from left to right, clockwise. I take a reasonably sharp pencil and trace that carefully, every bit that I can trace, especially the end.

Now, before I move on, I number that. That’s number one. The next intersection is right there. Same thing—trace it carefully into the scallops and across the long sides. That’s important. That’s number two. The next point is right there; slide it right up against it. It doesn’t matter if these marks begin to crowd each other.

So, we’re up to number three. You might be wondering how to determine what points. Well, these one, two, three points can be connected by straight lines. With these points located on the actual fitting piece, it’ll just be straight line work from point to point.

Once I get to a radius, the point location becomes subjective and approximate, and you just kind of cross your fingers. The next straight line will be right there, running out to where it would intersect.

You don’t want to make a mistake on this. You don’t want this thing to shift while you’re marking. There’s the mark—that’s number four. It’s important to mark them. If you were paying attention, I started out with my scallops to the right, and then when I started marking the radius, I rolled them over to the left.

Does that make any difference? I don’t know, but it's a visual cue in this spaghetti bowl that these are the marks that will bring us around that half-round shape. What I’m doing here is just a funky shipbuilding iteration of a storyboard for setting grades for siding around a house or the story pole made for establishing drawer heights and styles in old-school cabinet building.

The idea of making a permanent measuring device out of a stick has been around longer than tape measures. I’ve got my storyboard, which is really a template, and my substrate is just foam core for ease of cutting. This could be quarter-inch plate steel, birch plywood, or glass if you knew how to handle it. The piece that has to fit the space is fastened down, and your storyboard goes on top of it carefully.

It has to be fastened. I’m going to use tape. Is masking tape the best? It’s good enough for cardboard on foam core, and that’s what I’m using. Try not to cover up too much of the marking because you’d be surprised how little pencil marks can make a big difference. Everything’s secure now.

Here comes the magic. Here’s my tick stick. Right here, right now, we begin to reestablish what it is we're trying to match. Here’s number one. I lay it on there so that the bizarre shape conforms to the marks as closely as I can.

And we’re going to declare a fit. We’re going to come out here and mark the very tip of the world. Since it's foam core, I'm going to go one step further and actually punch a hole right there. Then, I put a corresponding mark. This is number one; that’s number one.

Number two. What a mess! It’s a mess until you lay the tick stick on there, and suddenly what you’re shooting for snaps into focus. There are all the marks conforming to all the shapes, including the end and the back.

That means that is the second point. Number two. Number three—who can even tell where number three is? Well, there it is going off the edge of the world. Oh, there’s the rest of it. There’s the back.

We’ve got shadows in the shop. Here we go. There’s the back. There’s the end. There’s the scallops. Perfection itself. It’s right at the very edge. That’s number three.

So, it looks like chickens ran amok, right? But it’s a magic transfer of information from this page to this page. I’m going to pull this off and start marking before I cut.

Let me just tell you this: there are bonus points involved if any of you use this process in the project or the challenge that you bring to the Essential Craftsman Buildoff. And I hope some of you do.

So, obviously, I’m cutting foam core with a utility knife, which is way different from cutting a piece of glass or steel or bird’s-eye maple, but the concept is the same. If you were cutting a substrate like that, I would cut it out of plywood first, dry fit it with the plywood, and then make the marks on the plywood about plus an eighth or minus an eighth or plus a thirty-second.

You know, I would probably create on the heels of what I just used a try piece. There’s no harm in that, depending on how nice it’s got to be. But as you know in construction, there are plenty of times when a sixteenth is perfect and an eighth is acceptable. It just depends on the project.

All right, here it is. Oh, I think the first one I did was better. Look at that! I mean, if this was a try piece, you could add that eighth. I’m an eighth short right there. The radius is okay, but I’m an eighth short there.

Let’s see if I can sneak that out. Let me show you the one I did a few minutes ago practicing before we even started the camera. Yeah, this one’s actually a little better.

Anyway, you get the idea. So, repeating myself: in 50 years of construction, I’ve only needed this three times—twice in blacksmithing, once in a roof stack. But if I hadn’t learned from Mr. Muk about a tick stick, if I hadn’t gotten online and seen some other demonstrations that people had done to give me some idea of how to show it to you, we wouldn’t have gotten this far.

Because a square, a rule, a T-bevel square, or dividers… I mean, if you want to get something like this done, my friends, you’ve got to make a spiral stick. You have to pay attention. By the time you’ve made one or two runs at this, you’ll have a fit that you won’t mind putting in front of a camera—sort of.

Thanks for watching Essential Craftsman, and keep up the good work!